Shelter is a toxic asset

NIMBYism is a fatal disease.

Housing is a human right and a human necessity.

Housing is also the designated path to intergenerational wealth accumulation and class mobility (it used to be housing and labor rights, but America got rid of those in the Reagan years).

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

Housing can’t be both an essential speculative asset and a human right. If the way you provide a better life for your kids is to buy a house and wait for its value to go up, then you require one of the essentials of human existence to get much more expensive.

This has an immediate effect: people who don’t have houses can’t afford them, and the people who do have houses vote for policies that make houses more valuable, including eroding tenants’ rights.

The fewer rights tenants have, the more rights landlords have, and the more a home is worth to a landlord, which means that house valuations go up across the board.

Landlords’ and homeowners’ interests aren’t always aligned. Landlords favor lax zoning rules, because the market will value a home not just on how much rent can be extracted from it today, but also on how much the same land could generate if it sported an apartment building.